Storytelling Science

Sehwag's Brain

Amitabha Mukerjee

Shoaib Akhtar's ball, all 100 mph
of it, is less than half a second from crunching into your ribcage. If you are like
me, your top priority is having intact bones after the encounter.And yet VirendraSehwag goes out there, throws all batting
rules to the four winds, and manages to score three hundred runs.Obviously, somewhere, something is wired very
differently in his brain!

Consider the magnitude of the task.Your eye can see well only for a small region
(abt a 50-paisa coin at arms length).This fovealregion is held steady for about 1/3d of a second (called a saccade) before being
whipped around amazingly fast (700deg/sec) to some other point of interest. This
is what your eyes are doing even as you readt h e s ew o r
d s, but you are so used to it, it's hard to catch yourself
doing this.

Change Blindness

What most of us don't realize is that we
don't "look" at things even when we are looking straight at them. Say
you go into Nirula's, and are ordering food from the lit-up
menu. Suddenly the man at the cash register drops a pencil and goes beneath the
counter to fetch it.Unknown to you, this
is actually a psychology experiment, and out pops an altogether different
man!His face is different, he has a moustache,
he is a bit taller.Would you notice?This phenomenon
is called Change Blindness, and overwhelmingly, people don't see it!

This happens because our mind can only calculate
so much.To survive, we must pay "attention"
only to that which is likely to be most crucial, and If
someone's face is not likely to change, we don't refresh it.

Fixating the Eye

So what is crucial about Shoaib's
ball?What you and I do, and many
coaches recommend, is "to keep your eye on the ball".But this is very difficult because of the ball's
speed and we get only very rough estimates of its motion. If we could see the ball
with the eye at rest, we could get some really precise data.

Where would you look while Shoaib's ball is hurtling towards
your ribcage? [Image: MooshirVahanvati]

But each fixation is about 300 milliseconds,
and in the half second that Shoaib's ball will take, you
can have at most one saccade.So how does
Sehwag's brain cope?Recently some British neuroscientists studied cricketers' gaze by using "eye-trackers".
Here is what they found: Until the point of delivery, an expert batsman
like Sehwag fixes his gaze on the bowler's delivery, from
which he guesses the bounce point.He makes
no attempt at all to "keep his eyes on the ball".His gaze races ahead and locks onto the bounce
point about 150 milliseconds before the ball gets there. Where it bounces, and how
soon, tells him the two things he needs to know – when will the ball reach the bat,
and how high will it be then.You can work
these out with class nine physics, but Sehwag's brain
learns this and stores it in its circuits, (which is a lot faster than algebra).Knowing these, he can swing his bat with the
millisecond precision needed to hit those fabulous sixers.
. .

So now you can see why this plan is really the
"best".Given you have just this
one saccade, this is the best possible way to use it. Sehwag's brain has learned
it from experience.Next time you see him
batting, think of his brain, and let its workings illuminate your own personal
science . . . and that of a child near you.